Carcassonne rules change two cities9/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Markets score based on how many colors they include, and there’s just one color per tile, so you’re encouraged to build markets to include all three colors - which will be at least three tiles. In City Jurgen-Wrede does something very similar. (And you want the nugget, because it gives you an extra play.) This pretty much exemplifies how you can take a rule and turn into an integral part of the gameplay instead. The result is that if you make a 2-tile forest you don’t get a nugget, while if you make a forest of 3 or more tiles, you do. ![]() All of the forest tiles except “caps” have gold nuggets on them. Hunters & Gatherers introduces an organic 2-tile penalty in a very clever way. A few of the other Carcassonne standalones show how this can be accomplished. Instead more elegant mechanisms should be constructed where players don’t have to remember an arbitrary rule, but instead play as they are “supposed to” because of more organic gameplay mechanics. However, if we assume there is some good game design reason for the 2-tile penalty, we might not want to see it utterly removed. Though Discovery is for the most part an elegant game, it introduces the 2-tile penalty to every type of terrain which adds an intimidating grid of possibilities to the game where each terrain can be scored in three different ways, which turns out to be the biggest barrier to getting people into the game. Only one standalone game has tried to match the original game’s rule, and that’s Discovery, and I think the results speak for themselves. The SdJ committee was probably correct in demanding that it be removed, and I expect the game is better for it. It added unnecessary complexity to the game by introducing a seemingly arbitrary special case. But, having always used the current German rules in play (which get rid of the 2-tile penalty), I just don’t see that, and generally I don’t see any reason that allowing two tile plays might be a bad thing.Ĭonversely it was pretty clear that the rule to disallow them was a bad thing. I suppose Jurgen-Wrede thought it was too easy, and that it might encourage tactical in-and-out play where you never got to build larger cities. The reason behind the 2-tile penalty has never been clear to me. The original rules for Carcassonne (and the ones still used in the “official” Rio Grande edition) call for a 2-tile penalty: if you make a city out of just two tiles, you only get 2 points, not 4. We’ll look at each of these elements in turn. Examining them offers some interesting insights both into game design and how the Carcassonne series has changed and evolved. I’ve identified three major elements, each of which differs quite a bit from game to game. This week I’ll be continuing my look at the six standalone Carcassonne games and taking a look at how each one offers different answers to some major game design questions. Carcassonne Standalones Part One: Tiles and Scores.Carcassonne Part Four: Complexity & The Rivers.Carcassonne Part Three: Cooperation and Competition.Carcassonne Part Two: Balance and Tiles.Carcassonne Part One: The Original Game.The first four extensively covered the main game and its expansions while the last article instead looked at the standalone variants, and examined how their tile selection and scoring differed. In case you’ve missed them I’ve written five previously. Welcome to what just might be my last game design article on Carcassonne.
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